ISSUE 012:

While our trail runs have been building a solid community in Colorado the last few months, from behind the scenes, we’ve been grinding - perfecting ideas that will spark excitement to runners and wild-minded explorers alike.

Halfway across the world in a much hotter and more humid place, Vietnam is where a large amount of the world’s sewn goods are made. For the entire first two weeks of May, Yonder is running around in Ho Chi Minh City connecting with our factory partners, suppliers and industry colleagues in an effort to push prototypes and making serious progress towards our ultimate vision - a series of backpacks that address the runner’s needs across life, training and in competition - every detail built with performance in mind. These features set out to eliminate distractions from your adventures—packs that keeps up when the demands get tough.

This all sounds well and good, but with this effort comes a lot of trial and error, or educated and explorative decision making. We realize we have to fail at a higher rate than most would budget for in order to discover where we can innovate and what must remain within the industry standard. This is what we call ‘exciting stress’ that is a careful orchestration of factors to make a vision feasible across suppliers, manufacturers, timelines, and other unforeseen limitations.

One our first day, we were presented a series of samples, each being the first attempt at each design submitted months prior to our arrival - A concept interpreted into a physical form. What is amazing is how quickly you can evaluate a sample, giving instant feedback because you get to judge the sample against the intended goal and make suggestions as to where the accuracy was closer and further away from the intended vision. We carefully comb over every detail and make remarks with notes, pictures, and illustration to help describe to the factory what needs to change - a roadmap that the project leads can then carry out to their pattern makers and recreate a completely new sample.

Once samples are worn on our back, the scissors come out and the prototypes are torn to shreds as we continue to refine our feedback on how the relationship between materials, proportions, features, and placement work in harmony with one another.

Its not in our mind to only make running packs, but to energize the industry with our philosophy.

-CB